fragments on re-collecting

xtian w

Born of silence, sound entangles everything. We open our mouths & tones become words, become worlds sprung intimate, drifting amidst bodies. Air opens, swallows voices back to quietude & the whole earth shifts. If i should say to you i am this or i am that, to what or whom are the words, once spoken, bound? You’ll feel them drifting, but how did we learn them? What is their weight in this gravitational world?

Perhaps all structures rise from dubious foundations. The earth moves endlessly; so weave & stumble all things upon it. Destiny play, this immutable shift. Was it Lincoln who suggested a house divided against itself cannot stand? Is irony a symptom of colonialism, or just another part of the virus? Maybe both. Ironic that instability should be among the prices of privilege, of all things

illusory. Structures & forms.

Here in america, years after Lincoln, deficits wear different masks, yet you walk outside & sense your place, aware of who owns everything, whether or not you can speak names or answer questions like when or why.

Liberty, it turns out, is as loose a thing as I. Loose, yet strong as gravity.

Desire floods all borders, bodies, maps, de-territorializes the Whole, longingly, before stitching the pieces back together, only differently. Differently. Pushes vertigo like it was the cleanest drug, the most euphorically, rapturous high. You might need it to survive, or at least, so you think, cutting lines staccato across a mirror. Is irony a side affect of jouissance, fermenting like surplus grain?

What about abundance dreams waste? Is one fantasy, one waking life? In the 21st century, how will we judge something inherently wasteful? Will we come to see hysteria as becoming abundant? as wastefulness? as both? Every desire, after all, a line of flight— where to, black coffee? digitized economy?

Slowly, everything becomes a dream against my body, until i’m uncertain what a body is, or if I have one, or who any of us are.

The Baptist cried desire throughout the desert, spent all day on Jordan’s bank condemning the wicked & preparing a way. John’s tongue-lyre sang for his Love; one of spilt light emergent from shadow fold. Oh! this world, all honey tar & brittle wet. The Baptist: so smooth his skin, so striated, his garments of camel hide. John waited by the river all day for god to come down, become-human. Re-territorialize.

Desire. John waited patiently while the river flowed on.

Failure, starvation, Eros, laughter. Waking up on the asphalt of the real.

Motions, embodiments, thoughts; radical, revolutionary, ordinary: existences labeled as such for the structures within which they fight for breath—which is to say, representation, which is to say, for life. Absent of imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis-hetero-patriarchy, what might we begin to imagine? How far will our bodies speculate, in & beyond these dermal walls? What do we find, cruising out there?

Cruising liminal. Are you certain you’re doing what you think you’re doing?

You are discontinuity. Self is other. i, a flowing mystery. These aren’t stories of presidents or prophets, paradigms or absent gods, though i am asking you how we might know what we do not yet know. i have many questions for your oracles, whoever you say they are.